From: Alex in the living room at home in PerthWhy: Because it's nice and cool in the air-con! (outside 41 C Summer Heat)Time: Australia Day (26th January 2007), 6:07pm

Nihao!

First of all, I just want to personally thank you for taking the time to read our story. China’s deep history and culture has been a large part of my life with my parents heavily involved in the community, promoting China’s rich culture through language teaching and the arts.

(By the way - you'll learn how to say Thank you real easily in the program)

Whilst growing up, I had one foot in the East and the other in the West, learning from the best of both worlds. Through ChinaSpeak, I hope to share China’s rich culture, deep wisdom and long history with you.

I was there training local Chinese teachers to teach English in modern proven, effective techniques, learnt partly from my Cambridge University training. I was also there teaching English in companies, 4 star and 5 star hotels, public and private schools.

Several of my expat mates (friends) from the US, UK, Australia, Canada and Ireland were very interested in learning to speak Chinese to communicate with the Chinese locals. (ie go eat and drink merrily and liase with the

It was then, in the restaurants, on the streets, in night markets, drinking tea, buying food, having a beer in the square that I helped them learn to start speaking practical, real-life Chinese. The cFoo Method learning system was born.

After returning back home to Australia to Sydney, I continued helping people, in my spare time, start learning to speak Chinese. The unfortunate perception of “learning to speak Chinese is hard” was still strong.

The challenge came when I got a call from Lloyd who was very interested in learning to speak Chinese several weeks before going to China. There was only one small hiccup. He was in another city - Melbourne. Testing the cFoo Method, fifteen minutes later we started his introductory lesson. On the phone. The rest is ChinaSpeak history.